Blessing Okebe: How to Build a Personal Brand While Maintaining Your Privacy

Building a personal brand is an effective method to demonstrate your talents and establish leadership in your field. Yet, balancing this marketing with privacy might be difficult for private individuals. While you want to put yourself out there and show the world how valuable you are, you also want to protect some privacy and not overshare.

So how do you build your personal brand without putting your personal life out there? These will give you a head start:

Shift Your Mindset

To get started, you must first abandon the notion that personal branding is just for those who are loud, extroverted, or don’t mind being seen. You must believe that you can become an authority in your area without discussing your family or other personal matters.

Choose ten thought leaders you know and appreciate. Consider what you know about them aside from their professional worth. You will discover that you know very little about the personal lives of many of them. You don’t know who their spouse is, how many children they have, or even where they live.

While it appears like they are putting their life on the line, you can’t say anything about them if you choose to ignore their skills. Amongst most celebrities, you can be certain that some have successfully kept their private lives concealed from the internet. There are many eyes on these celebs, so if they can do it, you definitely can.

Control The Narrative

Personal branding empowers you to control what others know about you, so leverage that power to choose the type of material you want to share. Do not discuss stories about your personal life, family, or relationships if you are not comfortable doing so. Concentrate on sharing ideas about your industry and establishing authority in your profession.

People will not know who you are outside of your glitzy social media persona until you tell them. If you don’t allow them in, they won’t know about your history. So think about what you want people to know and generate content around it.

Find An Alternative Emotional Touchpoint

We are frequently taught that in order to emotionally connect with our target audience, we should create content based on our personal life. While this is true since it makes you more relatable to your audience, it is not the only method to connect with them.

You may still connect with your audience by developing content based on common interests or values. So, identify common ground with your target audience that preserves your privacy, and generate content around it. It could be politics, football, technology, and so forth. Individuals like engaging with others who share their interests, and this develops into a bond known as an emotional connection.

As a result, your audience is emotionally involved in your brand while knowing very little about your personal life.

 Leverage The Online Space

The online space puts you in front of people all over the world, who only know what you want them to know. It gives you the opportunity to let people in without really letting them in. With social media, people don’t always need to know where you stay before doing business with you. They don’t need to know a lot about you before bringing opportunities to you.

Somehow, because of how you’ve put your professional value out there, they trust you and would only in a few cases ask personal questions when they want to work with you. 

So leverage the online space to promote your brand and put it in front of millions of eyeballs all over the world while setting a limit to what you show them.

Avoid Getting Into Trouble

Unresolved difficulties with people who choose to raise these concerns online are one mistake that exposes the privacy of persons who have worked very hard to keep it secret. These challenges may be personal which may bring your personal life to the spotlight. As far as possible, avoid conflicts with individuals, and if they arise, try to resolve them before the other party decides to put them online.

However, if the other party brings it to light regardless, a few hints to manage the situation and avoid more private details flying through the internet will include:

• Keep your cool: It can be easy to get defensive and react impulsively when faced with negative comments online but doing that may lead to even more details coming out. You can rather choose to ignore it and let people move on when they are done talking about it.
• Respond privately: Despite bringing the issue to the open, there’s still a chance you can put out the fire by reaching out to the person involved. The best approach to this still remains to get it right with people as much as you while staying in your lane.

Building a personal brand as a private person is difficult, but it is not impossible. It all comes down to finding the correct balance between displaying your professional qualities and protecting your privacy. By following the recommendations provided here, you can begin to develop a personal brand that reflects your abilities and experience while still respecting your personal boundaries.